Microsoft Viva Connections | What Is It?
* Viva Topics will be retired on Feb 22, 2025, and has ceased new feature developments as of February 22, 2024, due to Microsoft’s focus on Copilot. *
One of the more obvious challenges presented by a remote work environment is the lack of social connection. It can be easy to feel isolated and disconnected when you’re working behind a screen all day alone in your living room. Having social connections has been proven to stimulate collaboration and boost efficiency. With that being said, we also know the great flexibility that working remotely offers – you can have both with Viva Connections. Viva Connections is a module of Microsoft Viva, the employee experience platform designed for employees working from home. It’s a curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in the apps and devices you use every day.
What is Viva Connections?
Viva Connections of one of the four modules offered in the Microsoft Viva Suite, along with Viva Insights, Viva Learnings, and Viva Topics. Viva Connections is a personalized view of news, conversations, and communities using the apps and devices your staff already know and leverage every day. It’s everything employees need at their fingertips to stay engaged, to find what matters most to them, wherever they are, and whenever they need it. It lets them contribute ideas and know their voice is heard. Indeed, Viva Connections was created to help foster communication across the workplace. With Viva Connections, you can create customized dashboards to provide easy access to company resources, such as calendars, health and wellness reminders, and holidays. This one outlet is the perfect place to bring together news, conversations, and resources. Despite being in a remote environment, employees can remain connected.
In short, Viva Connections is:
- A branded application experience in Microsoft Teams that is optimized to enable information workers and frontline workers, whether they are on desktop or mobile devices.
- A gateway to employee experiences, with the ability for you to curate the content and tools you want to deliver through quick access to data and tasks, relevant news, communications, people, and resources.
- Built on existing capabilities in Microsoft 365 like SharePoint, Teams, Yammer (Rebranding to Microsoft Viva Engage), and Stream.
Viva Connections features
Let’s take a look at some of the features that are available to you.
Dashboards
The Viva Connections dashboard is where all the fun stuff takes place. The dashboard is a customizable experience that you can design for yourself. The dashboard provides employees access to the most critical content and tools through the use of dashboard cards. It’s a visual option to provide easy access to information. You can customize the layout of your dashboard to suit your needs and access it on mobile or desktop devices.
Dashboard cards
Dashboard cards are what’s displayed on your Viva Connections dashboard. Dashboard cards come in medium and large sizes for users to interact with to complete a task or gain information. There are plenty of ways that dashboard cards can be used, here are some of our favorites:
- Displaying a quick view with more information or an input form
- Navigating to a SharePoint page
- Accessing a Teams app
- Accessing a site in the browser
Instead of digging around for information, you can easily visualize information and quickly interact with the dashboard cards to find what you are looking for.
Feeds
Within the Viva Connections app, users will see a personalized feed with information from across their organization. The feed is a great way to stay up to date with corporate communication and engaging content. The feed has great features that automatically balance these two aspects to keep the content fun and engaging. Important messages that require the attention of all employees can be promoted to raise greater awareness. If given permission, the content will be aggregated from a variety of sources, including SharePoint news, Yammer community posts (Rebranding to Microsoft Viva Engage), and for video-type content, Microsoft Stream.
Where to access Viva Connections?
Viva Connections is both a desktop and a mobile experience. It is powered by SharePoint and built into your Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Deployment is easy, use your existing Microsoft Stream, SharePoint, Yammer (Rebranding to Microsoft Viva Engage), and Microsoft Teams infrastructure to deploy the platform with minimal time and effort. For a step-by-step guide on deployment click here.
Plans and pricing
The best part about Viva Connections is that it is automatically part of Microsoft 365. If Viva Connections is the only module of Microsoft Viva that you’re interested in, then there is no need to pay for the Microsoft Viva Suite. All elements are present by default with your standard Microsoft 365 license.
The lack of connection experienced in a remote work environment is not a problem to go unnoticed. The features offered through Microsoft Viva Connections tackle this problem first-hand. This internal communication platform ensures that all employees are kept up to date on important information and have access to all the resources they need to thrive at work. This is just the start of your business transformation process, check out our eBook to learn more!
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